Tuesday, April 22, 2014

The cost of female coders II

Last month, a number of allegations were made against GitHub and some of its employees, including one of its co-founders, Tom Preston-Werner. We took these claims seriously and launched a full, independent, third-party investigation.

The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment. However, while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment. In light of these findings, Tom has submitted his resignation, which the company has accepted. Tom has been a huge part of this company from the very beginning and we appreciate all that he has done for GitHub. We wish him the best in his next endeavour.

As to the remaining allegations, the investigation found no evidence of gender-based discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or abuse.

So, the claims were determined to be false, but the executive resigned. And the woman they hired isn't there anymore either. How does this episode represent a triumph for women in technology, exactly?

36 comments:

Yes, it seems the lesson here is that, if you're going to hire a woman, you'd better make sure not only that you never make any mistakes in the way you treat her, but that you never make any mistakes ever, about anything, period. Because if she ever becomes unhappy with her job, you will be investigated until enough "errors in judgment" are found to justify wishing you well in your "next endeavor."

It's a "triumph" for women because Horvath successfully INVADED a "male space"

That's all it's about, and all it's ever been about. Getting into places where they aren't wanted. Whatever happens after that is completely inconsequential to the feminists. It's just like the suicide bomber in a marketplace .... they only care about penetrating the target and causing mayhem.

Because hostile environment and all. It is hostile to work and a hostile environment is created where woman can accuse someone of sexism and sexual harrassment. Since this is a fact, someone had to go. His wife should not work there... sexism, favoritism, and nepotism all mixed up together and all. I'm sure she is often referred to as the dragon lady.

"Julie calls out an engineer in her story. The engineer she alleges harassed her was in fact an ex-boyfriend that she was still friends with at the time, not a random coworker she barely knew."

"""Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees."""

We DO NOT need that kind of shit in I.T. It should be a place where people are focused on the task, and interested only in getting on with the damn job and achieving success. Too many women bring their home lives, personal drama and outright bitchyness to work, where people are just trying to get on with their damn jobs.

A woman at my place spends EVERY fucking day arguing on the phone with her husband about random shit, at her desk, right next to our boss. He can't say shit because she'll burst into tears and he'll get a talking to about being "sensitive".

As I said I.T should be purely about getting shit done. We don't need all this crap.

I'd take her phone, throw it out the window, and tell her to get back to work, because that's what the owners are paying her to do ... work, not get sit around on company time arguing with her moronic husband.

Of course, first document everything with the witches in H.R.... and ask them why they have to do paperwork all day while the woman in question sits around and goes around and around with the idiot who married her.

Add in just the cost of the extra bathrooms, at two to one for women to men, and the extra cost of cleaning those. Women are pigs when they don't have to do any cleaning of an area. Well, and the stink removal and scent cover that is required for women's bathrooms. Money down the hole.

Yeah, but on the other side? If men are willing to fall on their swords, while when I can I will cease doing business with that company, I can't really shed many tears for a pussy. Further, I suggest something else is going on, behind the scenes. Most likely the companies want to change their methods in a way that is not in alignment with the beliefs of the CEO, and is just using other methods to get rid of them. Something queer is happening here, much as the deaths in the financial sector.

Bob, easy fix.Have a justifiable reason to be recording things in the workplace: creating a training video, crafting some notes for your team, etc.Make sure you can clearly hear her, and start recording whatever your plan requires (with lots of pauses so that she can be heard more clearly). Find some way to post it or run it by others outside your little group. Make sure you follow up later and say that people were certainly amused by the "extra" content of your recording, in front of her. Ask her if she can speak a little more clearly next time while you're recording for work purposes, as not everyone could clearly hear each detail of her conversation.Make sure you erase all copies so that she'll never know exactly what everyone else was able to hear, nor be able to remember exactly which conversation you might have recorded.

Longtime reader of AG and VP but first time poster. Recently had an opportunity to observe an event specifically designed to expose high school girls to programming and coding. The event had corporate sponsors and top flight IT professionals. Workshops were designated for Code Divas and Design Duchesses.

A team of 20something women – ostensibly there to either relate and demonstrate how STEMMY girls wound up being successful or serve just to serve as relatable emotional conduit for the girls – were on hand. They primarily passed the time on phones checking Facebook or whispering about how living arrangements with Mr. So-and-So were frustrating them. Or so I overheard.

The high school girls with high SMV followed the basic directions in the workshop assignments, played with their hair, and generally looked bored. A couple of achiever girls actually thought outside the box and did some coding options that didn’t need hand-holding by the instructor.

When visiting information kiosks set up by local colleges and universities , the institutional reps asked the girls what their plans were for college. Of those i heard one-third didn’t know, one-third were entering health care (i.e. nursing), and one-third wanted to start their own business. Out of 60+ girls, less than 3 were actively interested pursuing anything programming or coding.

What could be taken from this event? The young women enjoyed the day, learned a few things, took the free stuff laid out to them, and less than 1% of them will become programmers or coders. So the FI continues to push something 98.8% of girls themselves aren't interested in doing. Sharing...

Is there a legal way to sift through the xx applicants to find female employees who are not (or less) likely to blow up your business? What are the keys to look for?

Over at Vox Popoli, a commenter by the name of dh was working on just that for a client. Identifying possible litigation issues with employees based on certain characteristics and social media. Unfortunately the project was discontinued out of what I believe were liability issues, if I remember dh correctly.

I did some videos on women in the workplace..."quota women" were the cause of the close of the IBM development lab in sydney in the 90s. I moved in 1990 because I could see the "quota women" were going to destroy the lab....and I was right.

As I've said over at Isteve, this whole episode and others like it (the "dongle" joke affair, etc.) is evidence that big money founders no longer see a bunch of young, hungry White guys willing to work insane hours and be insanely creative and talented as a key to generating wealth. You see this anti-White guy pc jihad by convenient feminists given all sorts of play because key players want ALL the money. And want to push the talented White guys out and replace them with cheap H1Bs.

Same as the NFL's obsession with Black QBS. You can plug them in every few years as they wear out and get busted up knees like Randall Cunningham. Replace them with another cheap(er) Black QB instead of paying high wages for years for the Manning Brothers or Tom Brady.

Follow the money. Programming labor is seen as no longer valuable. Thus the feminist jihad to replace White guys with H1Bs.

Uh oh, I agree with most of a Whiskey comment. Maybe I should check my temperature.

I think the higher-ups know they'll still need some nerdy white geniuses, but they're hoping to replace them as much as possible with quantity, that's true. That's one reason OOP was treated as the Holy Grail for a while: it was supposed to make it possible for a project manager to divide a program up into completely discrete, small, simple objects and assign each one randomly to whatever code monkey was available, who would be able to code it without needing to know anything about the rest of the program or anything other than that specific object's specs. It hasn't really worked out that way, but it hasn't stopped them from hoping to find ways to make programmers more fungible.

The funny thing is, in my opinion, higher-level languages have made programming more mentally challenging, not less. Back when you needed to write lots of lines of code to put a few characters on the screen, and you had to spend time doing repetitious stuff like garbage collection by hand, at least some of the work wasn't that challenging. The more that the low-level stuff is handled under the hood for you, the more time you spend focused on the actual logic of the program. When one line of code can do what used to take hundreds, that means you're packing that much more thinking into a smaller space and time. They're trying to bring in more low-level coders, at the same time that language advances are making them less useful.

The funny thing is, in my opinion, higher-level languages have made programming more mentally challenging, not less. .... When one line of code can do what used to take hundreds, that means you're packing that much more thinking into a smaller space and time. They're trying to bring in more low-level coders, at the same time that language advances are making them less useful.

Bingo. And to the extent any of the higher level language stuff delivers on it's promise, it require even more careful API design and implementation.

As to what the "higher-ups" are thinking, my guess is it breaks down in two ways.

One, for-profit production software companies (as in their software supports productive activities) like Microsoft are fat-n-happy with big revenue streams that they take for granted, so they (incorrectly, in the long run anyway) assume they can focus on feel-good stuff like this, and are more concerned with reducing costs (i.e. outsourcing to India and China) than delivering products.

Two, the Open Source community is funded based on politics instead of results, so again they are drawn to focus on stuff that is irrelevant to the productive capacity of the product.

A USABLE interface is what's actually required, along with the functionality needed. Yet I've seen so many women piss about making something look pretty, that it absolutely becomes either unusable, difficult, or just doesn't do what it's supposed to. Yet they consider it a success anyway.

Given that Male escort Sydney based are the exemplification of flawlessness, are generally carried on, look savvy, dress brilliant, are cleaned smooth and great entertainers where it matters, would you young ladies need to settle down in existence with one? thanks